Stories

New Relic is Rails 3.1 ready, and if you have any New Relic questions, from simple 'how to' down to deep technical stuff, New Relic now has 'office hours' with their web app tuning gurus. A live weekly screen chat, you can show up with your own questions and get the help you need.

Ryan Bates walks through a Rails 3.1 upgrade to an earlier podcast project. The initial upgrade takes about 30 seconds - the easiest major update yet! Of course there's a little more work if you want to use the asset pipeline...

Scott Watermasysk has published another gem to help push email sending onto a Redis queue. This one changes the mailer api slightly so its a little more obvious whats going on from a casual reading of the code.

Rails-footnotes is a gem by Jose Valim that adds some great context and debugging information to the bottom of your rails-generated web pages. It shows all kinds of info from cookies, to environments, to partials used to render the page, to routes that created links on the page. It also links page components right into your editor.

capistrano exts is a set of helper tasks Wael Nasreddine has written to help with the initial server configuration and application provisioning. Things like creating the directory structure, setting up that database, and other one-off he found himself doing by hand far too often.

Is your cap deploy so chatty you occasionally don't even notice failure? Fix that by colorizing the output. Most output is colorized with the defaults provided by the gem, but you can also write rules to match text and provide your own terminal highlighting.

This week Pat Allen released Combustion, a gem that aids in testing rails engines. Conventionally, rails engines are tested by embedding an entire rails app as a test harness... this pulls that code out and into a gem, so you define just the bare minimum needed to test your engine.

Rolling your own gem server isn't hard, but pushing to it is a manual process. In this article by Borja Martín, he rolls a gem server as rack middleware that automatically publishes new gems upon upload.

An administrative Snafu combined with travel to hurricane-tormented North Carolina combined to create the late publication of this podcast. Undeterred, we bring you the news of Steve's resignation, a few JRuby stories, a Guard howto, a new content management system, a few useful tools for dealing with ActiveRecord performance and reporting, and a great resource for Sass beginners and experts alike.